A personal blog about computer games, AI in games, and the relationship between thought and gameplay.

Saturday, 5 March 2016

7DRL Challenge 2016

Despite my desire to do more work on the upgrade to HarvestRL, I'm going to use the 7DRL challenge to again get something else done. This time, I'm working on improving various aspects of combat and positioning, so my entry this year is going to handle those things.

I'm calling it Deep Despair. The theme is a dwarven warrior who's lost everything except a vault of gold and is desperate to protect it. The game is going to be closer to a Hero Defense than a traditional RL in style, but I want to use the RL engine I've already built and add better combat mechanics to it: proper use of special attacks, positioning yourself to block attacks, and so on. The combat in HarvestRL was simplistic and much more uninteresting than I had anticipated. This time around, I plan to focus on that part of the game to make it more interesting.

When this is finished, I will have another game that is (hopefully) enjoyable to play but also has everything I need to put better combat into HarvestRL. I'll probably be lucky to have even 30 hours over the next 7 days to work on it, so we'll see how things go.